Soviet Defector Switch Alleged

March 2, 1986|The New York Times

Four months after a Soviet seaman jumped into the Mississippi River and said he wanted to defect, only to be sent home after apparently changing his mind, 60 senators want to reopen the case amid allegations that Soviet officials switched seamen.

Members of Congress and others are saying the man who jumped overboard near New Orleans on Oct. 24 may not have been the man who later told American officials he wanted to return to the Soviet Union.

State Department officials say they are certain there was no switch.

But several pieces of evidence support the possibility of a switch, at least raising questions about the case of Miroslav Medved, whose attempted defection touched off a weekend crisis in Soviet-American relations two weeks before the Geneva summit.

Caught in the crossfire is Lt. James R. Geltz, whose surreptitious photographs of the interviewed seaman are cited as evidence by those who believe he was not Miroslav Medved. As a result of the incident, Geltz was reprimanded and is leaving the Navy.

An official form completed by Border Patrol officers said the man who jumped from the freighter Marshal Konev and then was hauled kicking and screaming back to the ship was 5 feet 10 and weighed 174 pounds. But a Navy doctor who examined a seaman on board the ship less than 24 hours later described the man in his report as ``short stature, approximately 150`` pounds.

The man who jumped ship spoke fluent Ukrainian in his first evening ashore, according to the first interpreter who spoke with him. The man interviewed later spoke the language with difficulty, the State Department said afterward.

And two independent handwriting analysts concluded that handwriting samples taken on different days probably were written by different people.